Funding outcome

When babies and children undergo heart valve surgery, we must stop the heart using a heart-lung machine (bypass). Unfortunately, being on bypass has side effects that slow recovery in the intensive care, depressed heart function and lasting effects on future brain development. Doctors are always inventing new ways to minimize these negative effects. They were successful for adult patients needing heart valve repair, however those surgeries are not useful in children. Their approach is based on inserting devices to reshape the heart valve and does not account for the smaller sized hearts, or that a child's heart continues to grow. Should these devices fail, there is no option to surgically repair the valve, and therefore needs to be replaced. In general, heart valve replacements are troublesome for children as they commit the child to multiple future heart surgeries to upsize the device as the child grows. Hence, using existing adult heart valve surgical approach in children is likely to be unsuccessful. Instead, We propose a heart valve surgical approach that is tailored for babies and children. Using our experience in three-dimensional heart scans and Augmented Reality (AR), we will develop heart valve surgeries that can be performed without stopping the heart. The AR projections allow the surgeon to see inside the beating heart and perform surgery. We will test both AR and new surgeries, initially using a heart model that mimics a 'beating' heart, before conducting tests on a beating heart (animal model) to understand its impact on heart valves. We are confident the results will lay the groundwork for bringing AR assisted non-bypass heart valve surgery to children.